I've been in the IT industry since the time of the dinosaurs (ICL anyone?). I've written books about the Internet and networking, consulted for all sorts of companies, and been a contributor and columnist for Network World for 18 years (check out my Backspin and Gearhead columns). I created and co-founded Netratings (now wholly owned by Nielsen) and have CTO'ed for a couple of startups. I live in Ventura, CA. I do not surf.

2012: The Year of Cold Fusion?

Well, there goes 2011, a year that was, to say the least, a mixed bag.

In the tech world it has been an interesting year. The Large Hadron Collider has, so far, failed to find evidence of the Higgs Boson (boo!) but at least it didn’t, as some people had feared, create a black hole that swallowed the earth (hooray!). Biological research produced promising results regarding antiviral drugs that may cure the common cold (hooray!) but a cure for cancer and HIV stills seems a long way away (boo!).

Curiously over 2011 Silicon Valley has shown a powerful resurgence of energy and dynamism (hooray!) and with that some of the wild optimism that characterized the 90′s tech bubble has reappeared (hummm). Apple became a commercial monster (hummm) despite the passing of Steve Jobs (boo!) and the IT world also had a generally positive year (hooray!).

I could go on and on with boos and hoorays for pages but there’s one topic I want to focus on: Rossi’s Energy Catalyzer or “E-Cat” system that is, despite everything we know so far, still in limbo somewhere between Boo! and Hooray!

If this topic is new to you, the really short summary is that the E-Cat is a Low Energy Nuclear Reaction (LENR) or “cold fusion” device that generates large amounts of heat for a miniscule cost.

Why so many postings on this topic? Simple … as I pointed out at some length in the first columns, should Rossi’s E-Cat work as claimed, it will transform the world making oil, coal, and conventional nuclear power along with wind and solar power obsolete as energy sources.

Alas, despite a large amount of mainstream press coverage (most of it pretty uninformed and uninformative) and an incredible amount of blog coverage, the question of whether the E-Cat really works remains unproven because over the last year the E-Cat’s inventor, Andrea Rossi, has given a number of impressive but inconclusive demonstrations. These were inconclusive because they weren’t run in such a way as to remove doubt about what’s really going on and whether more energy was being generated by the E-Cat than was being put into it.

I should qualify that: When I write “inconclusive” I mean inconclusive to people who demand a realistic, scientific level of evidence … there’s a huge army of “believers” who contend (often in a fanatical and downright rude way) that Rossi’s system really does work. The central problem that makes the E-Cat so hard for people such as myself to believe in is that it would have to operate contrary to known physics.

… it’s time for the e-Cat’s proponents to provide the provable, testable, reproducible science that can answer these straightforward physics objections. Independent verification is the cornerstone of all scientific investigation and experiment, it’s how we weed out all sorts of errors from miscalibration to contamination, and how we protect ourselves from unscrupulous swindles. Given everything that we know … it’s time to set aside the mirage of Nickel + Hydrogen fusion and get back to work finding real solutions to our energy and environmental problems.

Siegel is only one of many scientists who dispute the claim that the E-Cat can work yet despite such commentary it has been reported that Rossi has secured many orders for E-Cat systems to be delivered in 2012. On top of that a number of other companies have appeared offering similar products which, like Rossi’s E-Cat, have yet to be proven to work.

So, here we are, at the close of 2011 still waiting for Rossi or anyone to prove that the E-Cat or some other LENR/cold fusion device really works.

If the whole thing is a fraud it’s going to be one of the greatest in modern times. If it’s not, 2012 is going to be the year when everything changes.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

Rossi will probably prove to be real. He has understandable commercial reasons for not being in any rush to convince skeptics, since his patent position is doubtful.

He has several competitors, some not yet surfacing in public. Several of them are discussed in Cheap Green on the Aesop Institute website.

A system with several similarities was the subject of a 1993 Patent. It was not nuclear. The cover of the Patent along with the Abstract confirming substantial excess energy will be found in the same place on the Aesop site.

Patent law provides protection from the day the application is made. Rossi’s excuses for not allowing independent tests are simply nonsense. It would not risk his intellectual property.

Mark Goldes is someone who has been promising free energy magnetic motors and room temperature superconductors for decades, has consumed millions of investor dollars, and has never had a single independent test which proved any of his claims. I can see why he is sympathetic with Rossi.

Your response is misleading. As you well know the US patent office refuses to even accept applications for patents which involve exotic energy, namely cold fusion. Though Rossi has not claimed that his device employs cold fusion

The typical 3 points of disbelief are and addressed as follows. 1. Over coming the coulomb barrier a. LENR is a weak interaction and only involves the accumulation of low energy neutrons. 2. No fast neutrons. a. This reaction is due to the accumulation of cold neutrons and Beta decay. Similar to the S process in solar nuclear synthesis which is responsible for the valley of stability in the Chart of Nuclides. 3. No Gamma rays. a. The 4H system is formed well below 1eV and does not change parity or spill with the Beta decay event. With no spin parity change, electric dipole radiation of gamma rays is forbidden and the energy is transferred to the lattice as phonons. (Julian Schwinger)

Based on the Brillouin Energy Corp.(BEC) hypothesis and supporting experiments at Brillouin Energy, LENR is driven by a weak interaction. Any material with a unit cell or molecule able to include hydrogen nuclei and obtain or exceed a Molecular Hamiltonian of 782KeV due to the superposition of phonons (dT < fSec) has the potential to run a Controlled Electron Capture Reaction (CECR) process, providing the system has conduction or valence band electrons available for capture. Peter Hagelstein showed that this is possible starting on page 24 of his article in RLE Progress Report 145. The electron capture event provides a natural reduction in energy of the system instantly removing 782KeV of energy from the unit cell nanoparticle or molecule. That energy represents the removal of a proton from the bounding Coulombic box, an electron, and conversion of energy to mass. A detailed paper / Hypothesis is available at the links below. It stays within the current (2011) standard model of physics. This reaction involves several steps that require some knowledge in several different disciplines. The first link provides the background necessary. I strongly recommend LISTENing to the power point at http://www.brillouinenergy.com/BE25Tec.PPS at least once before reading the full hypothesis at http://www.brillouinenergy.com/BrillouinEnergyHypothesis.pdf

I wish I could understand what you are talking about, but it sounds really good. No seriously, why is it so hard for the people to admit they don’t know everything yet? Is it because they are too lazy to try and reason out a logical explanation for a new phenomenon. Anomalous heat production in electrochemical experiments has now been reproduced many times by respected researchers in laboratories in many different countries. Whether Rossi has something or not is not the real question, although I tend to believe he is genuine. Skeptics who obsess about Rossi are missing the point. The point is, there is something happening which cannot be explained by conventional physics. So what should be our reaction? Should we bury our heads in the sand and pretend that it is not happening? or try and think of a logical explanation. I remember when the laser was first discovered, there was an article in the “New Scientist” magazine that described this new phenomena as interesting but ultimately of no practical value. This is typical of the attitude of the scientific establishment. If we left things up to them, there would be no progress at all. Let us study this new phenomenon until we understand it, and then see if it can be optimized for practical applications.